Apple Says App Store Had a Record-Breaking Holiday Season

Apple announced on Wednesday that it App Store experienced its biggest holiday season ever, seeing over $1.1 billion in app purchases in the two-week Christmas/New Years holiday period.

New Years Day, January 1, 2016 was the best day in history for the App Store, with customers spending over $144 million total. The figure broke the previous one day record, which had been set one week earlier, on Christmas Day.

“The App Store had a holiday season for the record books. We are excited that our customers downloaded and enjoyed so many incredible apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV, spending over $20 billion on the App Store last year alone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We’re grateful to all the developers who have created the most innovative and exciting apps in the world for our customers. We can’t wait for what’s to come in 2016.”

Worldwide, the App Store has brought in nearly $40 billion for developers since 2008, with over one-third generated in the last year alone.

Apple claims that mostly as a result of the App Store’s success, the company is now responsible for creating and supporting 1.9 million jobs in the U.S. alone, with nearly three-quarters of those jobs attributable to the community of app creators, software engineers and entrepreneurs building apps for iOS, as well as non-IT jobs supported directly and indirectly through the app economy.